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An Employee Disengagement Quiz: Monday Morning Percolator #8

April 9, 2007 By 2 Comments

 focus.jpg

If you are a leader here is an important multiple choice question. Your answer may indicate the role you play in your employees’ level of disengagement.

As a manager, my interactions with employees surrounding their performance is the following:

a. who has time to talk with employees about this kind of stuff?

b. we talk about how to improve their weaknesses.

c. we talk about their strengths.

If you answered “c” the chance of your employees being actively disengaged is 1%.

In an interview about the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 for the Gallup Management Journal, Tom Rath discussed the strong link between a leader’s focus and employee engagement. Here were the 3 powerful conclusions from Gallup’s research on conversation, engagement, and strengths:

  1. If your manager primarily ignores you your chances of being actively disengaged are 40%
  2. If your manager focuses on your weaknesses your chances of being actively disengaged are 22%
  3. If you manager focuses on your strengths your chances of being actively disengaged are only 1%

Perk Up:

  1. You have only one task this week. Ensure that you talk with as many people, as much as possible, about thier strengths and performance. Use strengths to muscle out disengagement!

Picture Credit: Fore! By http://flickr.com/photos/ecstaticist/

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Filed Under: Disengagement, Employee Engagement

Strengths: The Master Lever of Team Engagement

April 7, 2007 By Leave a Comment

Here is a short quotation from page 9 of Marcus Buckingham’s, Go Put Your Strengths to Work:

While there are many good levers for engaging people and driving performance — levers such as selecting for talent, setting clear expectations, praising where praise is due, and defining the team’s mission — the master lever is getting each person to play to his strengths. Pull this lever, and an engaged and productive team will be the result. Fail to pull it, and no matter what else is done to motivate the team, it’ll never fully engage. It will never become a high-performance team.

Go Team Go.

Knots:

  1. Use this week to design work work to play to the unique strengths of each team member you lead.
  2. Work with the individuals and the team to identify each person’s strengths and double your effort to design team work to be a fit with the unique strengths of your team members.
Zinger on Leadership: Strength, Love & Energy
Filed Under: Employee Engagement

Be Decent: A WE(E)-Factor Book Review

April 2, 2007 By 1 Comment


Are you decent?

I have just read the overview of Steve G. Harrison’s, The Manager’s Book of Decencies. It is subtitled how small gestures build great companies. This book sounds WE(E) to me and I look forward to reading it.

Here is an outline of what constitutes a small decency:

Greet coworkers authentically and personally
Remember to say thank you – or better yet, write thank you notes
For meetings you convene, be the first to sit down – the last to get up
Welcome visitors by name. Better yet call them “guests”
Answer your own telephone
Express recognition when things go well, hoard responsibility when they don’t
Convey bad news in person
When you make a mistake, admit it and apologize

So the question becomes, how decent are you as a leader?
What are the small gestures that give strength to your leadership?

Zinger on Leadership: Strength, Love & Energy
Filed Under: Employee Engagement

We Did It Our Way: Monday Morning Percolator #7

April 1, 2007 By 2 Comments

twins-holding-hands.jpg

Holding Hands by http://flickr.com/photos/harpers/

The title of the third post I wrote in this employee engagement blog was: If it is to be it is up to me.

I appreciated the meaning compacted into a 10 2-letter word sentence. I was inspired by the sense of responsibility and accountability embedded in this pithy statement.

To percolate is to give something time and to let it simmer in our brain. After 6 months of percolating, I now want to revise this statement to reflect the principles of partnership and co-creation. When I wrote this statement I was 51 with an emphasis on 1. Now, I am 52 and I want to highlight the 2.

So the revisions of this statement based on changing just one letter is: If it is to be it is up to we. Yet, flipping “M” to “W” is very significant. Employee engagement is fueled through partnership, close connections with leaders and reports, friendships at work, and our caring connections with others.

I resonate with the picture of the twins holding hands and it reminds me when my twins, now 15 years of age, were that age. There is so much energy derived when we connect with others and they connect with us. We may not be wee any more, we may not hold hands at work, but we can always think as WE.

Engagement moves beyond individual effort and tasks to residing in relationships. Watch out Frank Sinatra, I am tempted to rewrite I did it my way to We did it our way.

On my strength based leadership blog I am also in the process of flipping me to we as I write a series on the  WE(E)-Factor for leaders. This is taking place as that blog is dedicated to the Mount Everest we-theme of The Brotherhood of the Rope.

Perk Ups

Identify the people who contribute to your engagement and ensure that you let them know the contribution they are making to your development

Thank you Dushyanta Persaud for being such a positive and caring person who has helped boost not only my engagement but the employee engagement of countless people you have worked with or led, and in your leadership I always sense you are working with the people you lead.

Seek out someone at your workplace who is disengaged and devote your energy to connect with them and contribute to their engagement.

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Filed Under: Employee Engagement
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